Spine 7

spine 7 Editor Eric C. Wilder Production Assistance Vyki Hendy Cover Design Shayla Bond Content Coordinator Vyki Hendy Article Contributors Susanna Baird, Mary Ryan Karnes, Fernando Mateus, Jack Noel, and Karen Faris Covers Review Vyki Hendy, Fernando Mateus, and Jackie Shepherd

Copyright on book design images are held by respective designers and publishers All other content Š Spine Magazine 2017 www.spinemagazine.co Published in Rochester, NY

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SPINE 7

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Contents Welcome in this issue

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Cover Showcase your covers

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Our Other Whitman: The Subversive Minimalism of a Boston Renaissance Woman by mary ryan karnes

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Q & A: Joan Wong fernando mateus

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Daniel Benneworth-Gray On Work-Life Balance & Process by susanna baird

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The Writer's Practice: Carmen Maria Machado by susanna baird

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The Making of SweetFreak by jack noel

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Interview with Designer Maria Elias by karen faris

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Eric C. Wilder

Welcome in this issue

Welcome to Spine 7. A lot has happened since our last issue.

We've opened up much of what we offer to the web, and the response has been overwhelming. It's nice to see so many of you celebrating the incredible work by the creatives who devote time and energy into developing absolutely remarkable work in creating books. In this issue we revisit some of what we have shared on the site, and included a few new surprises. I hope you enjoy what the Spine staff has put together for you.

The cover for this issue was designed by the incomparable Shayla Bond which she describes as, "An ode to the ebbs and flows of a story narrative." We feel that the design Bond created is a simple image that becomes more kinetic and involved the longer one considers it. Quite impressive!

For more of Shayla Bond's work, visit www.bondillustration.com.

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Cover Showcase

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Ramona Blue

julie murphy • Design by Aurora Parlagreco

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New Collected Poems marianne moore • Design by Luke Bird

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There Are Little Kingdoms kevin barry • Design by Rafi Romaya

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The Language Of Stars louise hawes • Design by Sarah J. Coleman

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Allegedly

tiffany d. jackson • Design by Erin Fitzsimmons

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The Fall of Lisa Bellow susan perabo • Design by Alison Forner

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Blood of Wonderland colleen oakes • Design by Jenna Stempel-Lobell

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Thursday's Child

sonya hartnett • Design by Jack Noel

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Son Patron

f. scott fitzgerald • Design by Utku Lomlu

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The Names They Gave Us emery lord • Design by Sarah J. Coleman

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Aging Disgracefully Danny Cahhill • Design by Brian Phillips

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The Lost Time Accidents john wray • Design by Pete Adlington

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Undying: A love Story michel faber • Design by Rafi Romaya

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The Bitches of Suburbia jane owen • Design by Vyki Hendy

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Mary Ryan Karnes

Our Other Whitman:

The Subversive Minimalism of a Boston Renaissance Woman

The spare, often floral, book cover designs of 19th Century Boston artist Sarah Wyman Whitman might conjure memories of piles of forgotten books at garage and estate sales. Think thin gold lettering on quiet green cloth. Think precious leaves and hearts. In a bookstore today, where slick, pyrotechnic covers compete for buyers’ attention, you might overlook Whitman’s designs for their antiquated simplicity. And you might regret it.

Whitman, whose artistic career and social influence made her one of Boston’s most prolific and intriguing artists, may easily be considered the mother of modern book cover design. At a time when cover design was dominated by ornate flourish and, well, men, she ushered in a new minimalism that continues to speak for itself.

First, a quick biography: Whitman was born in 1842 in Lowell, Massachusetts and spent much of her early childhood in Baltimore. She returned to Lowell with her family in 1853 and married Henry Whitman, a well-to-do dry goods vendor when

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Design: Sarah Wyman Whitman

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Design: Sarah Wyman Whitman 40

she was 24. Whitman took art classes from eminent Boston painter William Morris Hunt, then travelled to Europe to study architecture and the old masters under Thomas Couture, Hunt’s former teacher. Whitman enjoyed success not only in book cover design but also in painting, stained glass fabrication, art collecting, and art criticism. Her dedication to artistic and intellectual community led Whitman to foster a salon for Boston artists and thinkers at her studio, Lily Glass Works. Her passion for education and equality led her to give to such institutions as Howard University and Tuskegee college. She painted landscapes and watercolors deemed “too masculine” by her critics. She designed stained glass windows and fixtures for churches and Harvard alike. And by the 1880s, Whitman had become the only female premier designer at Houghton Mifflin, where she changed cover design from the inside-out.

Before Whitman, American book covers tended toward Victorian aesthetics. Ornate patterns and story-related renderings dominated covers. Cover design belonged to die-casters and mold-makers, not artists. Whitman’s minimalism, which made nearly radical use of negative space, subverted such traditions.

Consider the cover design for her friend Celia Thaxter’s An Island Garden: five slender gold flowers, stems interlocked, petals barely touching a delicate gold border. At first glance, the flowers seem identical, but upon further consideration we find delightful inconsistencies among them. Wary of anthropomorphizing, one might even say the flowers look like friends. Toward their roots, we find Whitman’s signature, a subtle heart design hidden between criss-cross graphics. The thin gold lines inhabit, but do not overpower, the green cloth binding on which they appear. Here, we find a new kind of book cover, one that champions artistic ability but eschews embellishment for embellishment’s sake.

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Whitman’s affinity for minimalism can be linked to the American Arts and Crafts movement, an aesthetic attitude that challenged Victorian ideals. Discouraged by mass production, worker alienation, and the drab, uniform quality of manufactured goods, proponents of Arts and Crafts imagined a society in which artisans could find fulfillment in craft and creativity. Rather than mass-produced and poorly curated goods, the Arts and Crafts movement advocated for both utility and aesthetic appeal. What better embodiment of Arts and Crafts values than Whitman’s book covers? After all, they served as both art objects and consumer goods. Whitman understood that books, for all their artistic value, are also cultural objects and—like any other goods—part of a commercial landscape. As she herself expressed it, “You have got to think how to apply elements of design to these cheaply sold books; to put the touch of art on this thing that is going to be produced at a level price, which allows for no handwork, the decoration to be cut with a die, the books to out by the thousand and to be sold at a low price.”

Today, the cover design industry still aspires toward Whitman’s “touch of art.” Though technology has allowed for greater detail, cover designers will always reckon with the liminal space their work occupies. Designers and artists must, like Whitman, make beautiful-yet-marketable covers. They must be invested in bringing beauty to common objects, like books. Though Whitman’s 200-cover oeuvre of simple flowers, hearts, and leaves may tempt us to deem it quaint, we must remember that, like so many garage sale finds, her work carries unspeakable value. It reminds us to look a little closer, a little longer, for art and intention in the objects of everyday life.

Sources http://char.txa.cornell.edu/art/decart/artcraft/artcraft.htm http://harvardmagazine.com/2008/01/sarah-wyman-whitman http://bwht.org/sarah-wyman-whitman/ https://www.amazon.com/Studio-Her-Own-Artists-1870-1940/dp/0878464824

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Design: Sarah Wyman Whitman 43

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Fernando Mateus

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Q & A: Joan Wong Joan Wong has designed covers for Vintage, Penguin, Alfred A. Knopf, Farrar Straus and Giroux, New Directions, Simon and Schuster and Harper Collins. She occasionally illustrates for the New York Times.

••• How did you start working for the publishing industry?

It all started when I took Gabriele Wilson’s book cover design class at Parsons. It was the first time I realized that there are people whose sole job was to read books all day and design for them. I immediately fell in love with the medium. I loved how it combined my interests for design and narratives. I loved how it contributed to literacy and the spreading of knowledge. I loved that every new book gives you a fresh opportunity to be creative. After taking Gabriele’s class, I became the intern for her studio. She then recommended me to Rodrigo Corral who I interned for during my last semester of college. I learned a lot about the publishing industry from both of them and by the time I graduated, a designer positioned opened up at Vintage of Penguin Random House. I have worked at Vintage, under art director, Megan Wilson, for almost five years now. I am so grateful for Gabriele, Rodrigo, Megan and all of my colleagues who have been so nurturing towards me.

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What’s the amount of time you usually spend on a book cover?

It really depends on the story. There are some books that instantly inspire ideas in me while others require more brainstorming.

Sometimes, it takes one day. Other times, it takes weeks Can you talk a little bit about your creative design process?

I start by reading the book. As I read, I scan for visual cues and tone. From there, I start pencil sketching ideas in little 1.5” by 2” thumbnails. Then, I start executing my ideas. More often than not, the final product deviates from my initial sketch due to a series of happy accidents.

How did you create the cover for The Illustrious House of Ramires The Illustrious House of Ramires is a novel about Gonçalo Ramires, the heir to a noble family of Portugal, and his quest to pen his family history. It is described as Don Quixote meets Walter Mitty. I decided that the most important themes from the book is the quirky character of Gonçalo and the idea of writing. I found some period appropriate paintings of men who resemble the description of Gonçalo and played around with them in different compositions while using the title and author as design elements.

I sent a couple of different cover options (shown below) to New Directions and the art director, Erik Rieselbach, ended up choosing the cover with the repeated Gonçalo heads.

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Do you have a favorite cover of your own?

My favorite cover is a design that didn’t make it to print. It was one of the rejected covers for Amatka by Karin Tidbeck. Amatka is a novel about a post-apocalyptic wintry colony where everything is made of mushrooms that can disintegrate if you do not label them properly. I gathered a bunch of vintage mushroom/fungi prints and liquefied them in Photoshop. I thought the final result was a trippy, creepy, beautiful and intriguing cover that was unique to the genre.

Unfortunately, we ended up with a different design but this version of Amatka still holds a special place in my heart.

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Susanna Baird

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Daniel Benneworth-Gray On Work-Life Balance & Process

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Imagine designer Daniel Benneworth-Gray, head down, tucked into a small, neat alcove. An iMac rests on the big desk, some sheets of good off-white paper and a very black pen off to the side. Here Benneworth-Gray sits, day in and out, churning out massive amounts of work: book covers for every press you've ever heard of, articles on work-life balance for Creative Review, and Meanwhile, his weekly design-news digest.

"Every now and then, this is exactly what it looks like," Benneworth-Gray told Spine. "It doesn't last long, though."

Benneworth-Gray's office does sit in a small alcove, but that small alcove sits in his York home, where he lives with his family, including a four-year-old son. With children, barriers between professional and personal, between designer and dad, are permeable at best. More often than not, his desk is "a highfunctioning mess." So re-imagine: small alcove, big desk on which sits not only the iMac, the quality paper, the exceptional pens, but also books, comics, notebooks, paper samples, LEGO, receipts, and doodles. "It's basically a nest, but I like it. I've grown accustomed to the inevitability and coziness of chaos."

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While Benneworth-Gray acknowledges that personal intrusions into his professional space can be frustrating, the ultimate payoff – flexibility – is worth it. Work can occasionally give way to daytime snail hunts, cookie bakes, Hey Duggee marathons, and can be returned to after the four-year-old's bedtime. And when he is hard at it and needs a community not beholden to naptime, whose main toolset isn't produced by Crayola, Benneworth–Gray turns to the water cooler of the 21st century: the internet, primarily the private sharing site Path and the very-much-notprivate Twitter.

"I try to keep my network relatively small. I don't understand how you can follow thousands of people and make any sense of it all.

As well as peers and heroes within the design world, I think it's important to engage with creative sorts in other, different disciplines. Writers, filmmakers, journalist, cartoonists — basically any area that I daydream about working in one day."

Benneworth-Gray also connects with the greater design community via newsletter. Every week he shoots out Meanwhile, a digest of whatever he's found that week to inspire. "My newsletter is me kind of thinking out loud. I don’t want whatever I’m currently fascinated with to be washed away, so there’s something about the whole selection/curation routine that helps me cement these thoughts in my head. It's process as memory."

Spine asked Benneworth-Gray to walk us through the design process on two of his recent covers, Joyce in Court and Street Furniture Design. Take it away, Benneworth-Gray.

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Joyce in Court

Adrian Hardiman, Head of Zeus Joyce in Court is my first cover for fabulous independent publisher Head of Zeus. Art Director Jessie Price is incredibly patient with me – I fling a lot of nonsense at her before we find the right direction! For this one, we considered some more illustrative concepts, with old courtroom sketches and photographs, but the timeless Big Type treatment stood out from the rest. I think it’s in keeping with the tradition of older Joyce covers – just letting the title do the work. I picture it sitting comfortably next to a first edition of Ulysses, looking better with age, charmingly battered and discolored like an old judge’s wig.

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Street Furniture Design Eleanor Herring, Bloomsbury

Street Furniture Design has a special place in my heart, because of where I’ve found it since it was published: one of my designs, on a book about design, in the Design Museum! Fine, it may only be in the shop, but it’s a start.

The cover went through a lot of iterations! The color and type were fairly straightforward – it’s always nice using Eames Century Modern – but it took quite a while to settle on an image. We had benches, lampposts, bins, traffic lights, bus shelters, telephone boxes, everything. Eventually Kenneth Grange’s parking meter won. I became a bit of a street furniture nerd doing the image research for this. I still get a bit excited if I see a K8 box when I’m out and about.

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Up Next After years of work on academic texts, Benneworth-Gray is branching out into fiction. He's also currently obsessing over film posters, and hopes this fascination leaks into his work at some point.

For more Benneworth-Gray, visit danielgray.com or at twitter.com/gray.

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Susanna Baird

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The Writer's Practice: Carmen Maria Machado During graduate school at the Iowa Writers' Workshop, Carmen Maria Machado heard other students discussing their short story collections, talking about how they wrote around a central concept. "They seemed to be focusing on a very specific theme or set of topics, and the stories are turning them over in various ways," she told Spine.

Machado found it ridiculous, this concept of limiting oneself to a defined thematic space. But then she looked at her work — about "bodies and sex and sexual violence and the physicality of bodies" — and realized she was writing this way, too.

By the end of graduate school, Machado had written and gathered a book-length collection of short stories for her thesis, called Her Body and Other Parties.

The work defies genre; Machado's stories are funny and horrifying and frightening and strange and beautiful, each exploring women's lives and what it means to occupy a woman's body. In her publisher's words, "Earthy and otherworldly, antic and sexy, queer and caustic, comic and deadly serious, Her Body and Other Parties swings from horrific violence to the most exquisite sentiment."

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Cover Design: Kimberly Glyder 60

The book has only recently hit bookstores and already won Machado the Bard Fiction Prize, is a National Book Award finalist, and has been nominated for the 2017 Kirkus Prize, impressive for a first book, especially one that couldn't find a publisher during its first round of submissions.

After working with her agent Kent Wolf and failing to find a publisher, Machado hunkered down with her book, pulling in, letting out, adding and subtracting. They sent it out again and Ethan Nosowsky, editorial director at Graywolf Press, called with a few ideas. "He said, 'Here's my vision for the book,'" she recalled.

He suggested removing three stories he felt — and she agreed — didn't quite fit. A little more work, and Machado arrived a "a lean, tight collection" and a publisher, Graywolf.

The stories included in the final version share themes, but were born of a variety of creative processes. Inventory, in which a woman itemizes sexual relationships while the world transforms in the background, poured out of Machado in a few hours. Mothers began with a question: What if a woman's ex-girlfriend came to her with a baby?

Fascinated by form and dedicated to exploding traditional notions of how to tell a story, Machado sometimes begins with a structural conceit. She wrote Help Me Follow My Sister into the Land of the Dead, part of the anthology Help Fund My Robot Artmy!!! and Other Improbable Crowdfunding Projects, as if she was writing a crowdfunding request. In that instance, narrative followed form.

Other stories sprung from inspiration found on one of Machado's lists. "I'm definitely an ideas person," she said. "I keep a lot of lists and collect them and go back to them. I'm acquiring little bits and bobs, and at some point it all pays off. " 61

Machado is not wed to a particular means of generating narrative, but she is very particular when it comes to how and where she works. "I wish I could be easier. I need to be in a relatively clean space." She needs drinks, usually coffee and seltzer. She needs to be alone; she's constantly reading aloud as she writes. "It's a way that I make sure my sentences are working," she said. "At home, I'll say sentences out loud as I'm writing." She also reads aloud to celebrate. "The reward for finishing something is, I can read it aloud to Val." (Machado's wife is the writer Val Howlett.)

Finally, Machado needs time, lots and lots of time stretching ahead of her. "I have to have all day to write. A week. Hours and hours and hours and hours. That helps me feel like I can move about."

Residencies in particular suit Machado's process. She'll undertake a residency via the Helene Wurlitzer Foundation next summer to work on House in Indiana: A Memoir, to be published by Graywolf in late 2019. The book will be her first nonfiction title.

"Nonfiction is much, much, much harder for me," she said. "I can write five short stories in the time it takes me to write one essay. It's a really different process mentally and emotionally. Even if I'm dealing with similar emotional materials, nonfiction is a new challenge."

The residency is almost a year off. In the meantime, Machado will focus on the classes she's teaching at the University of Pennsylvania and on promoting the short story collection. In addition to the prize nominations, the book is receiving many strong reviews.

Machado's okay with all the attention. "It feels good to be seen."

Find Carmen Maria Machado online at carmenmariamachado.com and on Twitter @carmenmmachado.

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Jack Noel

The Making of SweetFreak

SweetFreak is the story of a young teen who has her identity hacked and is then framed as the sender of vicious messages to her best friend. Then things get worse from there.

It’s CyberBully meets Gone Girl‌but, you know, for kids.

Between identity, social media, the general terror of school and the specific terror of being falsely accused of something horrible, there was plenty to get going with. Most of my early visuals tried to combine computer-y stuff with a sense of menace, like a bunch of windows making a ransom note, or a screen with a giant crack in it, or a threatening flock of cursors.

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I developed a number of options and showed them to my editor, Jane. She said they were nice enough, but a little cold and unemotional (which is something I hear a lot). So I tried to humanise them by, er, adding a human.

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I kept returning to the idea of fingerprints.

Fingerprints=identity is a pretty basic crutch (down there with heart=love or

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aubergine=penis) but seeing as a) phones these days are always covered in greasy

prints and b) they use thumbprint recognition for security, I felt I had license to go with the obvious.

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I decided to use real thumbprints rather than a stock image. This was partly because there’s nothing better than the real thing – with all the uniqueness and imperfections and honesty – and partly to 68

avoid the image-licensing paperwork. I set up an ink pad at my desk and took the prints of everyone who walked past, like the world’s meekest policeman.

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Then I scanned them and gave them candy colours (for the sweet part of the title) and made one of them blood red (for the freak part).

In my mind at least, the book cover becomes both a greasy-print laden phone screen and a host of suspects, but is also, you know, pretty. And as a bonus if you hold it up to my iPhone, you can unlock all my secrets.

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Karen Faris

Interview with Designer Maria Elias Maria Elias is an inventive and thoughtful designer. She has received accolades and mentions from AIGA, Design Observer’s 50 Books/50 Covers of 2015, and Type Director’s Club Communication Design for her work on the book Conviction.

Here she digs into her process for us and gives us some thoughts on the world of design.

Let’s take a look at Wildman. Concept looms high here. By using the horizon with boots tied to a power line, you are able to suggest simultaneously a rural and inhabited landscape. It’s intriguing and creates mystery before we even hit page one!

Could you say a few words on the design of Wildman and what was going through your mind?

Wildman is about Lance, a creative kid (musician) who needs to find the strength and independence to follow his creative calling.

Lance is the valedictorian, popular, and his mom is mapping out a conventional path for him that excludes music. Nobody wants his or her kid to take the risky path in life. But if you are a creative person, you can’t ignore it.

Wildman was an in-house favorite, which means there was debate about the jacket. In the end, this cover is right, and is an image from the book. It’s important to the plot, so I won’t say more.

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Design: Maria Elias, Illustration: Jeff Ă–stberg 73

However, the art style has a personal meaning, which I didn’t share with anyone during the process. Sometimes I go on meditation retreats. Out there closer to nature I try and leave my self behind and start over, like Lance does in the book. And when I found (the illustrator) Jeff Östberg’s work, it felt like being alone with a fresh start. Jeff’s work has the hazy clean quality of isolation but also clarity and truthfulness. No muddy colors on this jacket. It fits the tone of Wildman so well. The case is even cleaner, just the tree line, just a place to get lost.

The printed jacket has a beautiful purple streak through the sky. I went on press to get that purple streak right. The streak has a blink and you’ll miss it quality, a lot like getting your life on the right path.

I hope when people see the cover for The Suffering Tree; they really look hard at it. There’s so much to discover there and the longer, I looked, the more I saw. Everything goes round and round but there’s also a path on the inside. From a design perspective, what were the challenges you faced with this cover?

The Suffering Tree design was kind of a hunch. The book is about a present-day girl (Tori) and a cursed colonial indentured boy (Nathaniel). Nathaniel suddenly appears to Tori, because he’s been brought back to life with black magic. The potion is buried under a tree on Tori’s property. Nathaniel and the tree are linked, and what damages one will damage the other.

It’s a complex story, so it was a tall order to create a unified image.

Fortunately I ran across a tree ring print. An artist will ink and print a cross-section of a tree to create flat graphic rings that are gorgeous. It illustrates two huge elements of the story; the tree and time itself (rings on a tree retrace time). But it lacked the magical twist of the story, so I kept going. The undulation of the 74

rings could stand in for water under a colonial ship, as well as rocky ground under a graveyard, a tree, and the estate where the story takes place.

I did the lettering and hired the talented illustrator Justine Howlett for the inky art, and she came back to us with everything beautifully executed and that incredible crack all the way through the image.

The back cover art is a more literal interpretation of the story. I glossed the black to make it very black and give it contrast with the strong color of the background.

Design: Maria Elias, Illustration: Justine Howlett 75

I have to tell you, I very much admire people who can do visual design and write. Your blog is absolutely terrific so I want to spend some time talking about it! The posts highlighted your experience as Latina in an industry not terribly diverse and they were thought provoking. Would you ever consider expanding your thoughts into book form?

Thank you. Interesting! I had not thought about a book, though I certainly am open to writing in other formats. When I look at people like Peter Mendelsund, Lauren Panepinto, and Brian LaRossa, I do feel a kinship with designers who write. They have unique voices. Lauren is informative, smart, and funny. Brian has great insight and writes about creativity so well. And Peter is the deep-diver. His books make me happy and nerd-out. I want to be all those things in my writing future.

On the blog I use mostly covers by women because I admire their work and I feel personally empowered by their achievements. I generally write about topics that get stuck in my head. Usually things people take as accepted truths about design that I think should be reexamined. If you think you know how to solve everything, you are bound to lose your curiosity. Writing is how I stay curious and think things through.

I’ve never had anyone say that my blog was about my Latina experience. I’ve only written one post on diversity, The Hungry Outsiders, and it felt very personal. Having said that, I’m proud of that post, and I do think diversity in publishing is a solvable problem. It comes down to who is hired, supported, and promoted. All three are equally important. A diverse pool of interns will not solve the problem. Change is a team sport. If leaders in-house don’t make it a priority to grow and nurture this talent pool, they won’t flourish.

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If you were to mentor a young designer, what advice would you give them on how to succeed if they are not from the dominant discourse?

Thank you for asking, because it helps me to clear up a misconception. Everyone is part of the dominant discourse because reading and design is for everyone. Here’s my advice for young designers, regardless of where they come from: Be on the lookout for your champions. They often look different than what you expected, but a champion is someone who supports you, understands your talents and the way you think, forgives your flaws, points you in the right direction, and has patience and a cool head. These people are irreplaceable, so keep in touch. Support them back if possible.

Be on the lookout for heroes and heroines. These people have been where you are and you admire them. If you can find some with a similar temperament to yours, their career can be a loose template for your career. The best part, you don’t have to know these folks to benefit from their example.

Be as generous and open as possible in collaboration.

When working with others, designers are there to be the creative engines. A generous designer will help others sort their priorities.

Even if you think you disagree, listen first. How will you learn what you don’t know, unless you listen to others?

Remember everyone you work with will have a different job in the future. Keep it respectful. One day that person you disagree with could be your boss.

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Now that you’ve been in the industry a while, how do you see yourself evolving as a creative being?

As I get older I trust myself more, I rest more, I write more, I draw more. I’m eager to see what the future holds.

Big picture—I’m more curious today about the business side of things than I was when I was younger. I’m interested in data, especially where it can create positive change. For example, according to the Girls Scouts State of Girls Report, 1 in 3 girls in the U.S. will be Latina by 2030. That’s HUGE! Will publishing be ready for that cultural shift? I hope so.

Career-wise—Long term, I’m eager for new challenges, new audiences, and new types of collaborations. I’d like to work on more non-fiction, psychology, and sociology. A role in leadership appeals to me too, because I like discovering potential in others.

Speaking of the potential in others, any emerging designers or unsung design hero/ines we should be watching?

I’m always excited to see the work of Jason Ramirez, Alison Impey, Jen Wang, Laywan Kwan, Isabel Urbina Peña, and Joan Wong.

Any upcoming projects or designs you’d like to tell us about?

I'm really excited about the release of my jacket design for Miles Morales, written by National Book Award Finalist and Coretta Scott King Award winner Jason Reynolds. The book is awesome.

Like his predecessor Peter Parker, Miles deals with power and responsibility, but he also tackles institutionalized racism!

Not only is Miles a biracial character (he's Puerto Rican and African American) which is awesome in itself. But I also had the opportunity to hire Kadir Nelson to illustrate this jacket.

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Design: Maria Elias, Illustration: Kadir Nelson 79

I wanted to work with Kadir because he's in a class by himself. For those who compare him to Norman Rockwell, yes he's that talented.

I can't tell you what it means for a Brooklyn girl to design a jacket with my hometown rendered by Kadir in such gorgeous detail with a brown-skinned Spider-Man. It was very satisfying.

I hired Russ Gray to create the Miles lettering, which I wanted to be based on a mix of letter forms from previous Spider-Man logos, with the addition of a subtle Spider-Man mask eye shape inside the O of Morales.

When I got an advanced copy, you couldn't wipe the smile off my face for days.

For more Maria Elias, visit http www.maria-elias.com

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Contributors Vyki Hendy Painter, Designer, Lifelong bibliophile.

Susanna Baird

Susanna previously wrote for the online design community Dribbble, helping transform their occasional blog into the online publication Courtside. Her bylines also include AOL News, Boston Globe, Boston Magazine, and Publishers Weekly, among other publications. www.susannabaird.com

Mary Ryan Karnes

Mary Ryan Karnes is a freelance writer and a Master's candidate in fiction at the University of Southern Mississippi.

Fernando Mateus

Fernando is a designer and book lover with a passion for food.

Working for the portuguese publishing industry (books, newspapers and magazines) for the last 20 years.

Jack Noel

Jack is a cover designer and illustrator residing in London.

Karen Faris

Karen is a Rochester, NY based writer. More about her work can be found at www.karenfaris.com If you would like to contribute to the next issue of Spine please send your proposal to www.spinemagazine.co

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